The present invention provides for centralized management of branding information for a computer product. The present invention is particularly well suited for use with a software application to display branding information for various hardware and/or software components being utilized by the software application.
Marking products with company logos and/or trademarks is common practice. In the computer industry, hardware and software components used to form a computer product often have associated trademarks and are often supplied by a number of different companies. These hardware and software components for the most part remain unseen to end users. Notwithstanding this, it is still desired to present company logos and trademarks associated with the hardware and software components. To achieve this, branding data providing product and/or company names is sometimes included with the hardware and software components. The branding data associated with each hardware and software component is typically stored in a separate file in memory. Unfortunately, since the branding data for the various hardware and software components is stored in separate files, the branding data is time consuming to access and difficult to update especially when it is necessary to access branding data associated with multiple components.
Thus there is a need for improved techniques to manage branding data in a computer product.
The present invention provides for centralized management of branding information for a computer product. The present invention is particularly well suited for use with software application to display branding information for various hardware and/or software components being utilized by the software application.
According to one aspect of the present invention there is provided a method for managing branding data within a computer product. The method includes the operations of: storing branding information associated with the computer product in a central library; and storing at least one routine to access the branding information in at least one second library, the at least one routine being called by a software application requesting branding data and extracting the appropriate branding data from the central library in response to the call.
According to another aspect of the present invention there is provided a method of accessing branding data stored within a computer product in response to a request from a software application. The method includes the operations of: linking to a first library storing routines to access branding data stored in a central library in response to the request; calling the routines in the first library, the called routines loading the central library and extracting branding data from the central library identified in the request; and conveying the extracted branding data to the software application.
In one embodiment, the central and first libraries are dynamic link libraries. The branding data can include product names, original equipment manufacturer (OEM) names and images. The branding data can be stored in a version resource in the central library and can include string resources for the product names and OEM names. The images can also be stored in the version resource in bitmap resources.
According to another aspect of the present invention there is provided a computer readable medium including computer program code for accessing branding data stored in a central resource. The computer readable medium includes: computer program code for receiving a branding data request from a software application; computer program code for assessing the central resource to retrieve pertinent branding data based on the branding data request; and computer program code for conveying the pertinent branding data to the software application in response to the branding data request.
The present invention provides advantages in that the branding data is kept in a compact form, which can be easily accessed and updated. As a result, it is a simple and direct procedure to add new procedures and branding data and to alter existing procedures and branding data.